REVIEWS LIVE PERFORMANCE p. 5 CD p.20 BOOK p. 28 WHY PROBE? (THE NATURE OF COMPOSITION) p. 18 Volume 21, Issue 1 FREDERIK RZEWSKI’S THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED p. 22 $6.25 U.S. THE “PEOPLE’S MAESTRO” AT THE END OF A LONG CAREER p. 28 Volume 21, Issue 1 New Music Connoisseur is a semi-annual periodical focusing on the work of the composers of our time. IN THIS ISSUE +++ PUBLISHED BY Center for Contemporary Opera Jim Schaeffer, General Director +++ Eugene Rotberg, President Contributors ............................................................. 4 in conjunction with The American Composers Alliance +++ +++ The Screw Keeps Turning EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Daniel Felsenfeld ................................................. 5 Michael Dellaira ADVERTISING SALES REPRESENTATIVE Jennifer Fair New Music at the Philharmonic By Barry O’Neal ................................................... 6 ART DIRECTION & DESIGN Opus 1, Inc., Raleigh, NC The British Have Arrived ADVISORS By Barry O’Neal ................................................... 8 Barry O’Neal Frank Oteri Kelley Rourke Seminal Text-Driven Music in Context Eric Salzman OR Roads Taken, and Then Not Taken Mark Zuckerman By Leonard J. Lehrman ....................................10 FOUNDING PUBLISHER & EDITOR, ASSOCIATE EDITOR Barry L. Cohen Steal a Pencil for Me By Joel Mandelbaum .......................................14 +++ ADDRESS ALL CORRESPONDENCE TO: Why Probe? (The Nature of Composition) New Music Connoisseur Excerpts from a conversation between Peck Slip Station Hilary Tann and Arthur Margolin ......................16 P.O. Box 476 14 John Street New York, NY 10038 CD Reviews Mark Zuckerman: Email: [email protected] The Music of Godfrey Winham ........................20 Web site: www.newmusicon.org Matthew Harris: Subscriptions are $12.50 annually, $24 for two years. Steven R. Gerber: (Mostly) solo piano music .....20 For new subscription requests, renewals, change of address Tom Cipullo: Glory Denied ...............................21 notifications, donations and inquiries, please use the self- addressed envelope inserted into the magazine, or please Andrew Violette: Frederic Rzewski’s The People submit them to [email protected]. United Will Never Be Defeated ........................21 For advertising please contact Jennifer Fair at [email protected]. Puzzle ..................................................................... 26 All material © New Music Connoisseur, 2014 Book Review The “People’s Maestro” At The End Of A Long Career By Barry L. Cohen ...........................................28 2 | New Music Connoisseur Volume 21, Issue 1 | 3 LIVE PERFORMANCE reviews contributors Barry L. Cohen is a devotee of contemporary music in all its various manifestations. After a career in publishing (Fairchild, Hearst, Curtis, Forbes), Barry founded New Music Connoisseur 18 years ago, and until 2010 served as its Publisher and Editor-In-Chief. He studied music privately with Eric Ewazen and Adrian Carr and created original and realized music in his THE SCREW own MIDI studio, including an original score for a 16-mm. film. Daniel Felsenfeld is a composer. He lives in Brooklyn. Matthew Harris’s opera, The Mark of Cain was premiered last season by Chelsea Opera; this season his cantata for chorus and orchestra, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, had its German premiere. Kantorei of Kansas City recently released Music and Sweet Poetry: Choral Music by Matthew Harris. Keeps turning Daniel Felsenfeld Leonard Lehrman wrote the first English singing translations of Glinka’s A Life for the New York City Opera is doing what it corridors of childhood in a way that Czar, Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka, and Mussorgsky’s Getting Married. ought to be doing: the absence of a would no doubt have pleased Henry Excerpts are among his 1,250 YouTube videos along with 9 of his 10 operas, 3 of his 6 permanent home has helped rebrand it James. If at times it came off as too‐safe musicals, and many of his 197 other works. His opera HANNAH will receive its U.S. premiere into the lithe and fierce little company and lacking shock – the television was a Dec. 9 at Malverne Community Presbyterian Church and Dec. 23 at Hebrew Union College- who can afford to take chances, especially one‐trick; the bloodied Peter Quint just Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan. under the visionary helm of George Steele. stayed bloodied – that was no doubt And take them it does, evident by their Buntrock’s intention, as it was also that of production of Benjamin Britten’s lustrous Britten and that of his librettist Myfanwy Joel Mandelbaum is Professor Emeritus at Queens College and is the composer of creeper The Turn of the Screw. The piece Piper. The scary in Screw is not simply The Village, an opera based on a true story from the Holocaust focusing on rescuers in a should be the go‐to for every composer flesh‐deep; it is not intended to be The French village. interested in opera: few characters, modest Shining, but a true psychological thriller orchestral forces, and yet it is a robust and that keeps digging weeks after you have Arthur Margolin has a Ph.D in Music Theory from Princeton University where he near‐grand telling of Henry James’ chilling left it. little tale. studied with Jim Randall, Milton Babbitt, and Benjamin Boretz (whom he first met as an undergraduate at NYU). He has retired and lives in England with his wife Kelly and housemaster Frederick, an 11 year old cockapoo. Barry O’Neal continues to be involved with the music program at St. Michael’s Church It came off as distant but contemporary, rattling on the Upper-Westside, where he participated in the Songs of Light and Dark concert containing several world premieres. He was also the focus of a retrospective concert of his around the dark corridors of childhood in a way own music on May 3rd at Russell Library in Middletown, CT. that would no doubt have pleased Henry James. Sarah Plimpton is a poet and painter. She lives in New York City, shows at the June Kelly Gallery and has just published a book of poetry, The Every Day. The piece can be especially taxing on Casting was stellar, especially one Dominic the person charged with the staging. Armstrong (whom The Times aptly referred Fortunately for City Opera (and for all to as “clarion‐voiced”), who gave the ghost Welsh composer Hilary Tann lives in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate of us who saw it) the task was put in of Peter Pears a run for his proverbial NY where she is the John Howard Payne Professor of Music at Union College. She was the more‐than‐capable hands of Sam money. Laura Worsham was stunning as composer in residence for the Eastman School of Music Women in Music Festival in 2011 Buntrock. Recasting the piece in the Flora, and Sara Jakubiak was appropriately and Women Composers Festival of Hartford in 2013. Website: hilarytann.com early 1980s and referencing many a lost as the Governess (though only as the then‐contemporary film (i.e. posters character demanded; vocally she was spot Andrew Violette lives in Brooklyn. His Sonata for Guitar, premiered by Dan Lippel, is out of Luke Skywalker adorn little Miles’ on). And Jennifer Goode Cooper made on New Focus Recordings. walls and the television static plays an excellent spectral companion to Mr. a vital role a la Poltergeist), it was as Armstrong. In short, there was not a weak Composer Mark Zuckerman lives in Roosevelt, NJ. successful as an update like this can link in this small chain. But the true star be. The inevitable questions that result of the night was Mr. Britten, due to the in these displacements (why are they efforts of conductor Jayce Ogren and +++ writing so many letters when they could the New York City Opera, who drew out just reach for the cordless telephone?) of this scaled‐down orchestra the eerie were subsumed by the overall top‐down intended sonic delights. If there was iciness believability and cinematic presentation in the interpretation, it served, like the on the cover: of the project. It came off as distant but production, to lend the proceedings a Con Brio by Sarah Plimpton (oil on linen) contemporary, rattling around the dark compelling distancing chill, which glued the entire night together. 4 | New Music Connoisseur Volume 21, Issue 1 | 5 LIVE PERFORMANCE reviews The second set of subscription concerts by the high winds and bells. The Janácˇ ek element is movement fades away on a low and then a Symphony Orchestra with Ms. Josefowicz NEW MUSIC Philharmonic offered the New York premiere found in a meandering middle register idea high D from the violin. The second movement playing and the composer conducting) it begins of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Frieze (2012), that becomes a nearly disruptive ostinato. (Pulse 1) is as static as the first was active. to make sense. AT THE an orchestra piece in four movements that Despite the named influences, this “slow Slow and seemingly immobile, it has a gentle, PHILHARMONIC was jointly commissioned by the New York movement,” seemed the most personal in almost inaudible pulse, often played by the Mr. Salonen is probably still better known as Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic Society Frieze in the way its agitation kept speeding timpani, as if a heartbeat. The violin wanders a conductor than a composer after his long and BBC Radio 3 and written in some sense as a up and slowing down, before ending with a in delicate fragments of melody as if they were tenure as Music Director of the Los Angeles The New York Philharmonic, response to the Beethoven 9th Symphony (also long held woodwind chord, and the petering the random thoughts of someone trying to fall Philharmonic (he is presently based in London Alan Gilbert, Conductor: on the program), which was commissioned by out of the Janácˇek-like string interjections. asleep. There is unease here, but not panic, a where he is principal conductor of the Music by Mark-Anthony the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1822.